


tiny dots on an endless timeline

by letterthing



Category: Basketball RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-10
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-03-29 08:16:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13923072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/letterthing/pseuds/letterthing
Summary: a place to put my short john/brad drabbles.





	1. Chapter 1

“How’s the knee?” Brad asks, foot poking at John’s under the covers. The sun is streaming in through the window, early morning yawns and sleepiness starting to bleed from their bodies. Brad can see the dust particles in the room with the way the bright rays of sun are lighting up the room.

John puts his phone down on his stomach, turns over onto his side to face Brad. “Good,” he says, smile beaming — and Brad can feel his heart clench with the weight of what that smile does to him — “good, but sore,” John finishes simply.

Brad scoots his way across the few inches still between them and presses a kiss to the corner of John’s still-smiling mouth. “Anything I can do to help?” Brad mumbles against John’s cheek.

“Stop, that tickles,” John says giggling. Brad presses a kiss to his cheek and buries his face in his neck, softly sighing. They sit in silence like that for a few minutes while John finishes replying to his emails, Brad pressed along his side.

John finally finishes, leaves his phone to charge on the nightstand next to the hotel lamp. He turns over onto his side, face to face with Brad now, and throws a hand across Brad’s hip, thumb gently rubbing at the bit of skin exposed above the hem of his sweatpants, a reassuring touch. “You okay?”

Brad tucks his face further into John’s neck, mumbles “just miss you.” John can barely hear it. It’s vulnerable, scary. John wants to say ‘ _I miss you, too_ ’ or ‘ _I don’t know what to do if it isn’t playing with you_ ’ but it seems to raw, too vulnerable for the early hours of the morning, everything still waking up around the edges.


	2. Chapter 2

Brad takes his coat off, laying it over the empty seat in front of him. He shoves his duffel bag into the overhead compartment and settles into the aisle seat, waiting for John to make his way down to their row. It’s cute, Brad thinks, that John likes the window seat. He’s got a whole album on his phone of pictures he’s taken from up in the sky, some of them with the waning dregs of sunlight lighting up the landscape below, some of them pitch black save for the lights of the city below. It’s cute, the way John likes to take pictures, keep memories. 

Brad snaps out of the slight daze he’d daydreamed himself into as John makes his way down the aisle and pushes his way past Brad and into his seat. “Everything okay?” Brad asks as John plops down into his seat.

John hums, takes Brad’s hand in his, rubbing his thumb across the back of it. John’s smile is small and soft. 

When the rest of the team settles down into their seats, finally, the lights in the cabin dim and the plane gets ready to take off. 

As Brad shifts in his seat, getting closer to John and resting his head on John’s shoulder, Brad feels John’s fingers moving higher up his arm, over his forearm and up to his elbow. John’s fingers press at the skin of his bicep for a few minutes before Brad realizes what he’s doing  —  tracing the lines of his tattoos, fingertips following the ink under his skin. 

It’s soft, tender, and it pulls at Brad’s heartstrings. Brad twists his neck, presses a kiss to John’s neck, rests a hand on John’s thigh. 


	3. Chapter 3

“I’m fucking tired of losing,” John spits out. He wants to bang his head against the wall of the locker room.

“I know,” Brad says, the bone-deep sense of defeat he feels evident in his tone.

John buries his face in his hands. Mumbles out “I don’t know what to do.”

“There’s nothing we can do. We did everything we _could_ do. We laid everything we had out on the court,” Brad says. John can’t tell if it’s for him or for Brad. He doesn’t really care at this point.

“We always put everything we have out on the court. Why is it never good enough?” John asks, desperate and despondent.

“Hey, hey now,” Brad says. “You can’t think like that. You’re good enough. We’ll _all_ put in the work this summer and we’ll come back next year even better.”

“Yeah,” John says, still feeling broken and hopeless but not wanting Brad to feel bad.

“Things are gonna be okay. We’re gonna be okay. We’re gonna win you a championship, babe. Just give us another year. We’ll all get better.”

“Yeah,” John says, sighing loudly. Some of the hopelessness starts to bleed out, Brad’s relentless optimism not quite contagious, but. John can’t deny Brad anything. And if that means sharing optimism for the future, then so be it.

“Can we go home now?” John asks, desperate to get away from this, this overwhelming feeling of _not good enough, never good enough, choke choke choke year after year_.

Brad just smiles and throws an arm over John’s shoulders, hugs him in tight and walks out to the car with him.


End file.
